The mattress market of India is dominated by small and unorganized players. These players specialize in coir, cotton and foam mattresses, which cater to almost 90% of the country’s requirement for mattresses. A major growth driver for the mattress market in India is the growing urban population who is ready to spend considerable amounts for their luxury and comfort. This trend is attracting major global players to invest in mattress industry of India.
In an interview with Insights Success, Alphonse Reddy, Founder of Sunday Mattress gave some insightful answers highlighting the influences made by his company to take Sunday Mattresses to a new level.
Kindly brief us about your company
Sunday is India’s first sleep-focused, disruptive, technology driven company that is passionate about building mattresses and other accessories that guarantee outrageously good sleep. A key endeavor is to pair great products with a simplified and a hassle-free buying experience through its pioneering 100 nights returns on mattresses. Sunday is based in Bangalore and retails exclusively online through www.sundayrest.com. The company was founded in 2015 by Alphonse Reddy.
Sunday ensures that all key raw materials are certified by European agencies (LGA Germany, Euro Latex, Oeko Tek 100) to make sure that the products are not only comfortable but meet international health and safety standards.
The mattresses are designed by a mix of domestic and international team and are designed to suit Indian climate conditions while providing optimal spine support.
“The idea of a sleep startup germinated in 2011, but until 2014 we were running Fabmart, which is a sleep market place. In mid 2014, we started working on Sunday. We did not want to hurry with just about any product. We took more than 12 months and put our heart and soul into developing the product range that we have and to deliver it a very affordable price point for Indians. Sunday was started in 2015.” Alphonse Reddy
- Briefly tell us about the CEO/Founder of the company. What is his contribution in making the company?
Alphonse Reddy is the founder and CEO of Sunday, India’s first private label sleep focused startup. He is passionate about bringing high quality sleep solutions and a superb experiential shopping experience. He comes with over a decade of experience across technology, sales and distribution, strategy and private equity domains. Alphonse worked with Flextronics and Sasken in UK before joining Delta Partners with their strategy consulting and investment teams.
He finished his engineering from BITS, Pilani and MBA from INSEAD business school, France. Travelling is his passion and has traveled to or worked in over 40 countries so far. This is where the idea of Sunday Mattresses was born. Alphonse’s extensive travel made him acutely aware of how mattresses affected the quality of sleep. Upon returning to India, Alphonse had to change three mattresses in six months. The mattresses though new, were not returnable and that got him thinking. He went about on a personal project to discover what the ideal mattress was, what the perfect after sale customer service offering should comprise of and how to help a potential customer choose the perfect mattress in a highly fragmented market.
- Share your point of view on the current scenario of the Industry and its future.
The current mattress buying experience is broken for a consumer. They have to choose from a number of models with little differentiation and with hi-tech buzzwords of little value and are left completely confused. The prices are exorbitantly high and the sales are completely price and promotion driven. Plus there is no transparent pricing as most brands are sold up to 30% discount in most of the stores all year round. Once the mattress is sold the after sales experience is also poor.
It is a highly fragmented industry with known brands and other lesser known brands contributing only about 20-25% of the total market share. The addressable market for Sunday is about $3.5 b and growing at a healthy rate of 20% y-o-y.
Globally, mattresses with health and safety certifications are a norm and we think India will soon catch up on this trend. This means that consumers are becoming more aware, which is a positive thing. Mattresses are treated on par with food in the western countries and we are sure that India will move towards regulating this industry as well.
- During the journey towards growth, what are the challenges the company has faced? How and why do you consider yourself as fastest growing company?
Sunday is not just a fast growing company, it is also one of the few profitable startups. Just focusing on growing the top line might be easier compared to growing fast but profitably. This is what we have managed to pull off in the last 2 years of our operations.
Sunday was started with my personal savings. After one year, we raised seed capital through friends and family. We went through the same journey as most startups right from challenges with hiring, managing vendors, product development, marketing etc., In addition, our commitment and aim was to build a sustainable business than just to focus on top line. With limited capital we had to survive and compete with well-funded startups. Luckily, we have a great team and made some smart decisions along the way that helped us grow our business in a very competitive space.
We have grown 50x from our first month of operations 2 years back. This growth has not come at the cost of profitability. Our ROIC (return on invested capital) is over 118%. Today we deliver to more than 8000 pin codes.
We have achieved all this without ever discounting our product even by 1 Rs. That’s right; we never offered a discount to our customer because we price our product fairly and just stick to it instead of misguiding the customers by offering a discount on inflated prices
- What are the innovative strategies that you are working on to thrive in the competitive market?
Sunday Mattresses and accessories retail exclusively online and are priced aggressively.
Sunday offers –
- 100 Nights risk free trial – No more pressure to buy a mattress after trying it out for just 5 minutes. You can now return our mattress if you are not happy with it and get a full cash refund. Fabmart introduced this for the first time more than a year back in India as part of its market place model. Now it is being extended to Sunday.
- Better product – First Indian mattress which is 100% Latex and certified to European standards
- A unified sleep solution – We are the first company to think persuasively on offering mattress and pillow pairing along with other accessories.
- Aggressive pricing – Priced at 40-50% discount compared to similar mattresses
- Simplified product offering – No more confusion with having to choose from 100 different models. We just have 2 models to choose from: firm and soft
- Better looking – designed by acclaimed Japanese designer, Hiroko Shiratori, Sunday mattress are a blend of simplicity and elegance
- Which strategies do you follow to stay competent? How are you shaping yourself to become fastest growing company?
- We want to help people sleep more and better
- Focus on product – make greater products at an affordable price
- Focus on customer experience – make the entire process of discovering
6.What are the benefits and support your clients is getting from your company in this fastest growing competitive world?
- Lot of us are stressed and need to rest
- We are that company that is constantly thinking about how to help people sleep better
- We do it in a way that is affordable and
- How do you work on your long-term relationship with your clients? Kindly brief us about the most satisfactory experience with a client.
There is not one specific instance that stands out, but there are several amongst the IT professionals where they wrote back to me saying that the mattress has been a good send for them.
- Kindly brief us about your strategies to tackle the competition in your sector. What steps are you taking to ensure that you continue to grow and develop.
Innovation – We have to constantly innovate to stay ahead of the competition. This can come in the form of either product or service delivery. A good example is that the operations team has real time information about the availability of products and delivery status. One way we do this, is that every step of the supply chain is connected and information is available to everyone in the supply chain. One of the other things that we have invested in is to have real time delivery tracking enabled (available for Bangalore customers) which helps the customer see where his/her mattress is currently. There are a lot of other cutting edge initiatives that we are working but because of the sensitive nature of those initiatives, we are unable to discuss them until they are launched.
- What can be expected from your company in the upcoming years?
When someone is furnishing their home, we would like them to stop and come to Sunday because they would believe that we have a complete solution for their bedroom (to help them sleep better). This would open the horizons for our product team much more widely, instead of just being focused on mattress alone, we can look at the space as a combination of entire bed room ensemble which includes the bed, mattress, bedding, curtains etc.,
We want to get into categories where we can add significant value. We do not want to get into something just because the market is large. We want to enter a product category if and only if, when we think there is scope for disruptions either from a product or a price or from a service delivery point of view.
